A Fortunate Life

by Paddy Ashdown

  The Poole elements of our training were now over. But there were two more stages to go before I could qualify as a fully trained SBS officer.

  On 3 January 1965, I joined RAF Abingdon for my parachute course. Our first task was to learn how to land properly, using the parachute roll, which we practised interminably on the floor of an aircraft hangar. Then they taught us how to exit properly from the aircraft door, projecting yourself through it with sufficient force to break through the 120-mph slipstream. We did our live parachuting onto Weston-on-the-Green, a little World War Two grass airstrip, complete with hangars and all the usual airfield paraphernalia, alongside which runs the busy, twin-carriageway A34 road.

  To qualify for parachute wings you have to do eight parachute jumps, and I hated every single one of them. But not as much as the Ghurkha officer on the previous course who, we were told, was a veritable magnet for misfortune, particularly when it came to parachuting. On his first jump he had what is known as a ‘blown periphery’, which means that, on opening, one of the parachute rigging lines is thrown across the canopy. The effect of this is that when you look up to check your ’chute, instead of seeing the silk canopy neatly deployed in a nice round circle looking like a plate of shrimps, it has two lobes and looks like a brassiere. This is not fatal, but it does reduce the surface area of the parachute, causing you to come down a little faster and land a little harder. On his second jump, our Ghurkha had a three-lobe blown periphery, causing his parachute to look like a somewhat crumpled shamrock, giving him a real bang when he reached the ground. On his third jump he was caught by the wind and came down on the nearby A34, narrowly escaping being run over by a large articulated lorry. At this point I am sure I would have concluded fate was trying to send me a message and quietly chosen some career that did not involve jumping out of aircraft at a thousand feet with a flimsy silk contraption on my back. But, being a Ghurkha, he continued. On the fourth jump he was followed out of the door by an exceedingly large soldier from a Scottish regiment, who, being heavier than him, not only descended faster but also succeeded in doing so right onto the top of the Ghurkha’s open parachute, on which he then proceeded to trample with exceptionally large army boots. Thus locked together, the two men descended all the way to the ground, with the Ghurkha shouting ‘Murderer! murderer!’ at his Scottish tormentor. In the fifth jump, a night jump, our hero descended perfectly, but landed on an exceedingly dark Nigerian whom he was unable to see in the inky blackness. One’s sixth jump was carried out with fifty pounds of equipment initially attached to the left leg, but then released to dangle below you on the descent, so as not to get in the way of the landing. Needless to say, in our unlucky Ghurkha’s case the equipment release mechanism did not work, and he was fortunate to get away with only a badly bruised leg. I cannot remember what happened on the seventh jump, but the story of the eighth, qualifying, jump became something of a parachuting legend – of the gallows-humour variety. This was a night jump, with equipment, on an especially dark night. Our hero apparently accomplished it perfectly, then picked himself up, gathered his equipment, tucked his parachute under his arm and … stepped off the edge of the hangar roof and broke both his legs! He got his wings, but history does not relate whether he ever jumped again. (I suspect, though, that there must be quite a few apocryphal elements to this story.)

  After the parachute course we went off to the Royal Engineers for a demolition course. This I found interesting and fun after the unremitting physical exertion of the last four months. Our first task was to learn how things were built, the better to know how to blow them up. We had a small, wiry and very Cockney Royal Engineer instructor, who introduced one of his lectures on this subject thus:

  Right gentlemen. Today we are going to learn about piles for piers – and I do not mean ’aemorrhoids on haristocratic harseholes.

  Before we were allowed to begin actually blowing things up, we had to learn what to blow up to create the greatest effect. The principle here was to use the relatively small amount of explosive an intruder can carry to release the much larger stored kinetic energy of the machines you are trying to destroy. So, for instance, in a power station you blow the huge spinning flywheels off their bearings, and they then run loose and smash much more machinery than you could ever carry enough explosive to destroy. In a harbour, instead of sinking a ship where it lies, it is much better, if you can, to place a small charge on its rudder which is set off by an impeller; this fires the charge when the ship is well under way and leaves the uncontrolled vessel to crash into others and destroy the dockside facilities much more effectively than you would ever have had the time or explosives to do. Similarly, it is much better, if you want to blow up a railway line, to blow up the curved rails rather than the straight ones – first, because there are fewer curved rails, which makes them more difficult to replace, and, second, because a train coming off on a bend does more damage than one derailed on a straight – and so on.

  Finally, when we had absorbed all this, we were let loose with live explosives. We learned about primers, detonators, fuses, firing cable and all the other paraphernalia needed to make very big bangs. And how to set pressure switches (which go off when you put your foot on them), pressure release switches (which go off when you take your foot off them), time pencils (which rely on the predictable speed at which lead will stretch and ultimately break, under a constant pull), aniseed switches (the underwater version of time pencils, using the predictable rate at which aniseed dissolves in sea water), and how to improvise booby traps and time switches based on clocks and watches. We also learned how to set charges, make incendiary bombs using soap dishes and ferrous oxide (Jane was furious at the rate that soap dishes went missing from our home at this time) and how to make a shaped charge that would fire a heavy metal object from several yards away at electricity sub-stations, piercing their metal casings and causing a collapse in the local power distribution system (the new and deadly shaped-charge-based IEDs – Improvised Explosive Devices – used against armoured vehicles by the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan work on the same basic principle).

  We also had a very great deal of fun setting booby traps for the unwary amongst us and blowing each other up in a minor sort of way.

  Our demolition course finished, we finally became fully qualified Swimmer Canoeists in the SBS and took some leave before getting our next postings. To my delight I was sent back to Poole, where I was appointed the training officer in charge of future SC3 courses like the one I had just completed. This was a challenge for such a newly qualified SBS operative, but I loved it, for I really enjoy the whole process of teaching. It is not an accident that my father ended up as a teacher and that my sister and both my children are in the teaching profession. If my life had been different, I would have been very content to be one, too.

  Jane got involved in this training as well, often acting as an ‘agent’ through whose hands my trainees had to pass on the escape and evasion parts of their exercises. By this time she was heavily pregnant, causing some rather strange looks from the customers of isolated pubs in the Purbeck hills, where she would sit for an hour or so as a succession of young men came in and sidled up to her to receive their instructions for the next leg of their escape, hidden usually in the folds of a local paper which she pretended to be reading. On one occasion she even baked some current buns, inside which, wrapped in grease proof paper, were the instructions for the next leg. These were left with a friendly local shop owner who was instructed to hand them over on demand to all who could offer the appropriate pre-agreed pass phrase.

  Over the Easter weekend of 1965 an SBS colleague and I took part in the Devizes-to-Westminster canoe race. This involves 125 miles of non-stop canoeing, with 77 locks around or over which you have to carry your canoe. (The standing joke amongst us was that history only knows of one person who had a worse Easter than those who choose to spend it on this race.) My friend and I did this, not in one of the light, modern, rigid canoes, but in a heavy canvas fold
ing boat similar to those we used for SBS operations. Our time was a few minutes over 25 hours, and we won our class. I remember this race, and especially the last few miles down to Westminster Bridge against a flooding tide, as physically exhausting.

  By now Jane’s pregnancy was reaching its term. Although I was not yet 25, and therefore not entitled to service accommodation for my wife, the authorities bent the rules on the ground that, as the SBS training officer, I had to be close to the camp. In April 1965 Jane and I moved into our first service ‘quarter’, a newly built house just outside the camp’s perimeter fence. I immediately tried to grow things in the garden, but this was hopeless, because the soil was little more than a layer of flint and heavy clay. But I did plant a rowan tree on our back lawn, which survived and is still there.

  The new SC3 course I was taking through used to parade for PT at 6 o’clock every morning just outside our bedroom window, after which we would go for our run and swim accompanied by our dog, Pip, for whom it was a point of honour to be the first into the lake, the first to swim round the buoy and the first back to land every morning.

  On one occasion I took my trainees to Beaulieu in Hampshire for survival training. We first taught them which wild food they could eat, how to trap and fish, how to ‘borrow’ vegetables from a farmer’s field without leaving traces, and generally how to live off the land. Then we left them without rations for four days, to see how they got on. Each night there was an exercise involving a raid on one of the local military bases, after which they had to make their way back during the daylight hours to their base, using natural cover to avoid being seen. They got very tired and very hungry, and I recall on one occasion seeing two of them very nearly coming to blows about how to divide up a mouse between them. On another occasion I heard the most tremendous cacophony of clucking coming from one of the trainees’ hides. Investigating, I found one of our Marines (who subsequently proved to be an outstanding, determined and most courageous SBS operator) busily plucking a live chicken he had no doubt ‘liberated’ in a night raid on a local farm. I told him that the proper (and more humane) way was to kill the bird first and pluck it afterwards. He replied, ‘I know, Sir. I couldn’t bring myself to kill it. On the other hand, I am so hungry I can’t wait to eat it either. So I thought I would just get on with this first, so as not to waste time, and then deal with killing her later.’

  One pair of trainees on this exercise, however, seemed to be coping suspiciously well. They were always well fed, but seemed to make no attempt to set traps or lay clandestine fishing lines, as we had taught them. On one bright May morning I discovered why. About midday, I was sitting on a hill with a pair of binoculars looking at some open ground which I knew the trainees would have to cross to see if I could spot any of them. My attention was suddenly attracted to an out-of-place movement close to a large group of picnickers who had installed themselves about a hundred yards away on a pleasantly sheltered grassy sward where they had spread out their food. I trained my glasses on the group just as a hairy arm snaked out of a nearby bush and helped itself to some of their sandwiches, soon followed by another a few moments later! I watched, fascinated at this imaginative form of survival, to see if the group noted that they were sharing their picnic with two uninvited, invisible and very hungry Marines – but they never appeared to.

  In the second week of June I was away doing a reconnaissance on Ipswich harbour for a ship attack exercise when I was contacted by the SBS office in Poole to say that Jane was in labour. I rushed back to take her into Poole Hospital with her parents, who had come down from Burnham to be with her. We all celebrated prematurely and a little too well in the Mess that evening. Before going to bed, I called the hospital from a nearby phone box (we could not afford a phone) to ask for the news and was told that the baby would definitely not come until tomorrow and that I should have a good night’s sleep and call in the morning. I duly telephoned again at six the next morning, 13 June 1965, to be informed that I had a daughter, who had been born at 4 a.m. I dashed to the hospital with rather a thick head, but no flowers and nowhere to buy them from. I remedied this by ‘borrowing’ some flowers in a dawn raid on a Poole Borough municipal flower bed on my way. Jane says these were some exceedingly moribund sweet peas – in her words, ‘more pea than sweet’ – all wrapped up in an old piece of newspaper. But we were both so delighted at the arrival of our new and incredibly beautiful daughter that it didn’t seem to matter too much at the time.

  (Here I should confess that the morning of Kate’s birth was not the only time I was responsible for damaging the civic amenities of Poole, which advertised itself as the ‘Town of Flowers’ and took great pride in the floral displays ornamenting its public spaces. Later the same year I was being driven through the town in an army truck when we approached a particularly large roundabout which was the site of one of these horticultural extravaganzas. I told the Marine at the wheel, as one might any experienced driver, to ‘drive straight over’. Unfortunately he was only recently out of training, where he had been taught to obey an officer’s orders instantly, precisely and without question. He immediately put the lorry into four-wheel drive and, before I could stop him, drove ‘straight over’, exactly as instructed. We fled the scene, leaving two broad swathes of mangled foliage and muddied earth to mark our passage.)

  I cannot pretend that I was a very modern father – indeed, I fear I am anything but a ‘new man’. On one occasion Jane left me with Kate for a few hours, with firm instructions not to forget to change her nappy. She arrived back to find Kate nappiless and naked and us both asleep on the sitting room floor after an afternoon’s playing together.

  In August of that year we took our first-ever family holiday together. We borrowed a car-top tent from a friend and, together with six-week-old Kate and our heavily pregnant dog Pip, spent a week camping close to Abergavenny in South Wales. We slept in the tent on the mini-van roof, and the dog slept in the van below us. One morning when we were camping at Talybont Reservoir I came down early to try to catch some fish for breakfast, to discover our numbers had increased from four to nine, Pip having given birth to five puppies overnight. The rest of our holiday was more crowded but no less fun for the additions.

  In January 1966, after a very happy seven months in Poole, I was posted back to Singapore again, this time in command of an operational SBS based in the Royal Navy base on the north of the island. A month later I became 25, and so Jane and Kate were at last eligible for a free passage to join me and for service accommodation when they got there. We eventually found a little planter’s bungalow in a rubber plantation not far from my work.

  There were at the time two operational Special Boat units in Singapore, Nos 1 and 2 SBS. I was to command the latter, in the overall charge of an SBS theatre supremo, Captain Pat Troy. Both SBSs had been very active during Confrontation, carrying out raids and reconnaissance on Indonesian targets. Most of the operations had been canoe-and submarine-based raids and reconnaissances of various islands in the Malacca Strait that were being used as jumping-off points for terrorist groups being infiltrated onto the western coast of Malaya. On one of these the SBS party missed its rendezvous with the submarine because of strong tides and was well embarked on the long swim back to Singapore across the Malacca Strait when they were eventually (and very fortunately) found by a Royal Navy ship and rescued.

  But Confrontation was now spluttering to a close,* so further operations were put on hold for the time being, for fear of disrupting the delicate peace process then under way. Then what we had thought would be a temporary lull turned out to be a permanent peace.

  We were now asked to see what we could do to resolve a serious tactical problem that had come to light during the Confrontation operations. It was decided that it was becoming too dangerous for submarines to surface in order to launch their SBS canoe teams, and we were tasked with finding a way to launch and recover combat swimmer teams from a submerged submarine.

  Much of my first year in Singapo
re was spent working with the ‘A’-class diesel-powered submarines of the Seventh Submarine Squadron, also based in Singapore, developing a technique codenamed ‘Goldfish’ at Pulau Tioman, a remote island off the east coast of Malaysia.

  The procedure we devised started when the submarine first left port, usually long before the date of the intended operation. A submarine patrol can last a number of weeks during which it will probably have other tasks to accomplish, apart from landing and recovering SBS teams. Meanwhile, the SBS team needs to be kept in peak fitness and fully up to date with the developing intelligence picture. It cannot afford to be cooped up on a submarine for a long time and so should, ideally, join it as close as possible to the scheduled date of the operation.

  To solve this problem, we loaded all our equipment onto the submarine before it left port and then, some twenty-four or forty-eight hours before the operation, parachuted at night to a fixed rendezvous point in the ocean, perhaps two hundred miles out to sea where the submarine could safely surface to recover the team. It proved somewhat nerve-wracking to jump into an apparently empty expanse of water, trusting that the pilot of the aircraft was right when he promised this was the correct position and there really was a submarine down there somewhere, waiting for you.